The Dinner Party by Rebecca Heath

Publisher's Synopsis

Four Couples.
It's Summer 1979 in the idyllic suburban neighbourhood of Ridgefield, during a scorching heat wave four couples gather for their weekly dinner party.

An ordinary evening.
It's a chance for friends to catch-up, to show off their perfect marriages, to have a break from the kids... but secrets hide behind the lit-up picture windows and carefully curated lawns.

The beginning of a nightmare.
When Frank Callaghan checks on the sleeping children, he finds an empty crib where his 4-month old daughter Megan should be sleeping. The party-goers swear they didn't see anything. No one left the dinner table.

Forty years later, Megan's sister Amanda is still searching for answers when a stranger knocks at her door claiming to be Megan. The family are sceptical until they see what she is holding – Megan's blanket, taken the night she disappeared.

This shock appearance unearths many questions: Where has Megan been all of this time? Who knows what happened that night? And how well do you really know your neighbours?

My Review of The Dinner Party by Rebecca Heath

I think we've all been to dinner parties that we've regretted, but the night of 'the dinner party from hell' has a longer lasting impact than normal. Forty years after the event the fallout is still being felt and The Dinner Party by Rebecca Heath chronicles the impact on the children and grandchildren of some of the attendees.

In the summer of 1979 four couples attend a neighbourhood dinner party. It's an adults only affair so the kids were left at home, tucked up in bed. Periodically, a couple of the dads would pop home to check that the children were okay. And they were, until the final check of the night and 4 month old baby Megan was missing from her cot, the bedroom window smashed.

Forty years later and Amanda, sister of the missing baby Megan, has never given up hope of one day being reunited. It's a hope that became an obsession and has spawned the Megan Callaghan Foundation as well as The Callaghan Baby Podcast.

So on the 40th anniversary of that fateful night, a knock on the door reveals a woman claiming to be the missing Megan. She's not the first to make the claim so the family's hesitant to accept her at face value. But could it be true? So many questions. And that's when things start to get really interesting.

This turns into a rather complex domestic suspense story. It has me immersed in the lives, some of them rather grubby, of the 4 couples. The story is told through a combination of flashbacks, excerpts from the podcast and the present day narrative that focuses primarily on Billie, Amanda's daughter.

As desperately as the rest of the family want to believe that Megan has been returned to them, Billie remains sceptical. It's an attitude that eventually causes a schism within the family dynamic. And so the drama grows!

To add to the potential breakdown of the Callaghan family are additional revelations that start to pile all kinds of tension onto what had been a settled family unit. Author Rebecca Heath does a stellar job in building an ever-increasing level of drama into the story. The fascination lies in finding out which level is the breaking point.

I liked the flashback scenes to the '70s and thought they felt very authentic from the food eaten at the dinner party to the attitudes of the attendees. I was also humming along to the songs that led into the start of each episode of the podcast. They brought back some fond memories for me.

All the elements of intrigue play out in the course of this mystery. A seemingly unarguable case backed by DNA evidence, a slight skerrick of doubt raised by a single person, a building wave of information comes to light (both old and new). Through it all I was trying to keep an open mind while also trying to work out where the twists were going to come from.

The result is a compelling mystery that builds nicely from a fairly sedately paced start.